Death on Credit

by Louis-Ferdinand Celine

  He was crazy about balloons, he’d been an aeronaut almost from birth, ever since his earliest youth… with Surcouf and Barbizet*… highly instructive ascents… No records, no long-distance flights, no breathtaking performances! No, nothing showy, colossal, unusual! He had no use for the clowns of the atmosphere!… Nothing but demonstration flights, educational ascents!… Always scientific!… That was his motto and he stuck to it. The balloon was good for his magazine, it rounded out his activities. Every time he went up it brought in subscribers. He had a uniform for climbing into the basket, he had an uncontested right to it, like a captain with three stripes, he was an “associated, registered, graduate” aeronaut. He couldn’t even count his medals. They looked like a breastplate on his Sunday rig… He didn’t give a damn about them, he wasn’t a show-off, but it meant a lot to his audience, you had to keep up appearances.

  To the last, Courtial des Pereires was a staunch defender of “lighter-than-air” craft. He was already thinking about helium! He was thirty-five years in advance of his times! And that’s something! Between flights he kept the Enthusiast, his veteran, his big private balloon, in the cellar of the office, at 18 Galerie Montpensier. As a rule he only took it out on Friday before dinner to straighten out the rigging and fix up the cover with infinite care… the folds, the sleeve, the cords, filled the miniature gymnasium, the silk puffed up in the draughts.

  * * *

  Courtial des Pereires himself never stopped producing, imagining, conceiving, resolving, making claims… His genius tugged at his brains from morning to night… And even at night it didn’t rest… He had to hold tight to resist the torrent of ideas… And be on his guard… It was incomparable torture… Instead of dozing off like other people, he was pursued by chimeras, new crazes, fresh hobbies!… Bing!… The whole idea of sleeping ran out on him!… It was out of the question… He wouldn’t have got any sleep at all if he hadn’t rebelled against the torrent of inventions, against his own enthusiasm… This disciplining of his genius had cost him more trouble, more superhuman efforts, than all the rest of his work!… He often told me so!…

  When he was overcome in spite of himself, when after no end of resistance he felt swamped by his own enthusiasm and began to see double… or triple… to hear queer voices… there was no other way of stopping the onslaughts, of falling back into his rhythm, of recovering his good humour, than a little trip in the clouds! He’d treat himself to an ascent! If he’d had more free time, he’d have gone up a lot more often, just about every day, but it wasn’t compatible with the operation of his rag… He could only go up on Sunday… And even that wasn’t so easy… The Génitron took up all his time, he had to be there! He couldn’t fool around… Inventors are no joke… He always had to be on tap! He stuck to it bravely, nothing diminished his zeal or baffled his ingenuity… no problem, however stupendous, however colossal, however microscopic… He made faces but he put up with it… The “powdered cheese”, the “synthetic azure”, the “rocker valve”, the “nitrogen lung” and the “collapsible steamship”, the “café au lait tablet” or the “kilometric spring” that would take the place of fuel. No vital innovation in any of these far-flung fields was ever put into practice before Courtial had found occasion, not once but many times, to demonstrate its mechanisms, to stress its advantages, but also, without mercy, to point out its deplorable weaknesses and defects, its hazards and drawbacks.

  All this of course brought him terrible jealousies, hatreds without quarter, long-lasting grudges… But he remained impervious to these trifling contingencies.

  As long as he wrote for the paper, no technical revolution was recognized as worthwhile or even workable until he had said so and endorsed it in the columns of the Génitron. That gives you an idea of the authority he wielded. For every invention of any importance his verdict was decisive… The OK had to come from him! Take it or leave it. If Courtial wrote on his front page that an idea was no good – Heavens above! – persnickety, cock-eyed, absolutely unsound, that was the end of it. The contraption was dead and buried… The project was sunk… But if his opinion was definitely favourable… the thing would be all the rage in no time… The subscribers came running…

  In his office looking out over the gardens from under the arcades, Courtial des Pereires, thanks to his two hundred and twenty absolutely original handbooks, read all over the world, and thanks to Génitron magazine, exerted a peremptory and incomparable influence on the progress of the applied sciences. He directed, oriented and multiplied the inventive effort of France, Europe, the universe, the whole vast ferment of the petty “certified” inventors!…

  Naturally all this took some doing, he had to attack people, defend himself, and watch out for underhanded tricks. He could make or break an inventor, you never could tell which, by word of mouth or a stroke of the pen, by a manifesto or a flea in somebody’s ear. One day he’d almost started a riot with a series of talks on “the tellurian orientation and memory of swallows”… He was a wonder at writing digests, articles, lectures in prose, in verse, and sometimes, to attract attention, in puns… “Spare no effort to enlighten the family and educate the masses”: that was the motto presiding over all his activities.

  Génitron: Discussion, Invention, Aerostatics, that was the range of his interests, and actually those words were written all over the walls of his offices… on the title page and on the shopfront… You couldn’t go wrong! The most up-to-date, muddled, complex controversies, the most daring, most subtly ingenious theories on physics, chemistry, electrothermics or agricultural hygiene shrivelled up like caterpillars at Courtial’s command, and there wasn’t another wiggle out of them… In two seconds flat he punctured them, knocked them cold… You could see their skeleton, their fabric… He had an X-ray mind… It took him only an hour’s effort and furious concentration to knock the damnedest damnfoolishness, the most pretentious quadrature into shape for the Génitron, to make it accessible to the recalcitrant understanding of the most hopeless dolt, of the most boneheaded of his subscribers. It was magical work and he did it marvellously, turning out definitive, incontrovertible explanations and digests of the most preposterous, hair-splitting, far-fetched and nebulous hypotheses… By sheer force of conviction he’d have made a flash of lightning pass through the eye of a needle and light up a cigarette lighter, he’d have put thunder into a tin whistle. That was his destiny, his training, his rhythm… to put the universe in a bottle, to cork it up, and then tell the masses all about it… Why! And how!… Later on when I was living with him, it was frightening to think of all the things I managed to learn in a twenty-four-hour day… just by hints and snatches… For Courtial nothing was obscure, on one side there was matter, lazy and barbaric, and on the other the mind to understand between the lines… Génitron: Invention, Discovery, Inspiration, Light… That was the subtitle of the paper. At Courtial’s we worked under the aegis of the great Flammarion,* his portrait with a dedication stood in the middle of the shop window, he was invoked like God almighty whenever the slightest argument came up, any pretext would do! He was the highest authority, providence, the shining light, we swore by him alone and maybe a little by Raspail. Courtial had devoted twelve manuals to summaries of astronomical discoveries and only four to the brilliant Raspail, to “nature healing”.

  One day Uncle Édouard got the brilliant idea of going up to the Génitron office to sound out the possibility of a little job for me. He had another reason, he wanted to consult him about his bicycle pump… He’d known des Pereires a long time, since the publication of his seventy-second handbook, the one that people still read more than any of the others, that was most widely distributed all over the world and had done the most for his reputation, his fame: How to Equip a Bicycle in All Latitudes and Climates for the Sum of Seventeen Francs Ninety-five, Including All Accessories and Nickel-plated Parts. At the time of which I am speaking this little manual, published by the specialized firm of Berdouillon and Mallarmé, on the Quai d
es Augustins, was in its three-hundredth printing!… Today it is hard to conceive of the enthusiasm, the general craze that this piddling, insignificant work aroused when it came out… But around 1900, How to Equip a Bicycle by Courtial Marin des Pereires was a kind of catechism for the neophyte cyclist, his bedside reading, his Bible… Still, Courtial never ceased to be shrewdly self-critical. A little thing like that didn’t turn his head! Naturally his rising fame brought him bigger and bigger mountains of mail, more visitors, more tenacious pests, extra work and more acrimonious controversies… Very little pleasure!… People came to consult him from Greenwich and Valparaiso, from Colombo and Blankenberge, on the various problems connected with the “oblique” or “flexible” saddle… how to avoid strain on the ball bearings… how to grease the axles… the best hydrous mixture for rust-proofing the handlebars… He was famous all right, but the fame he got out of bicycles stuck in his craw. In the last thirty years he had scattered his booklets like seeds throughout the world, he had written piles of handbooks that were really a good deal more worthwhile, digests and explanations of real value and stature… In the course of his career he had explained just about everything… the fanciest and most complex of theories, the wildest imaginings of physics and chemistry, the budding science of radio polarity… sidereal photography… He’d written about them all, some more, some less. It gave him a profound feeling of disillusionment, real melancholy, a depressing kind of amazement to see himself honoured, adulated, glorified for the stuff he had written about inner tubes and freewheeling!… In the first place he personally detested bicycles… He’d never ridden one, he’d never learnt how… And on the mechanical side he was even worse… He’d never have been able to take off a wheel, not to mention the chain!… He couldn’t do anything with his hands except on the horizontal bar and the trapeze… Actually he was the world’s worst butterfingers, worse than twelve elephants… Just trying to drive a nail in he’d mash at least two of his fingers, he’d make hash of his thumb, it was a massacre the minute he touched a hammer. I won’t even mention pliers, he’d have ripped out the wall… the ceiling… wrecked the whole room… There wouldn’t have been anything left… He didn’t have two cents’ worth of patience, his thoughts moved too fast and too far, they were too intense, too deep… The resistance of matter gave him an epileptic fit… The result was wreckage… He could tackle a problem in theory… But when it came to practice, all he could do on his own was swing dumb-bells in the back room… or on Sunday climb into the basket and shout “Let her go”… and roll up in a ball to land when he was through… Whenever he tried to do any tinkering with his own fingers, it ended in disaster. He couldn’t even move anything without dropping it or upsetting it, or getting it in his eye… You can’t be an expert at everything! You’ve got to resign yourself… But among his vast panoply of achievements, there was one in particular that he took the greatest pride in… It was his soft spot… He’d tremble with emotion if you even mentioned it… If you came back to it regularly, you were his pal. As a digest, it won’t be any exaggeration to call it an incomparable gem… a shattering triumph… The Complete Works of Auguste Comte Reduced to the Dimensions of a Positivist Prayer in Twenty-two Acrostic Verses!

  For this unprecedented performance he had been hailed almost immediately all over America… Latin America, that is… as a great renovator. A few months later the Uruguayan Academy, assembled in plenary session, had elected him by acclamation Bolversatore Savantissima, with the supplementary title of “life member”… The following month the city of Montevideo, not to be outdone, had proclaimed him Citadinis Æternitatis Amicissimus. With such a title and the triumph he’d been having, Courtial had hoped to achieve new glory, of a somewhat higher order… he’d thought he could really go to town… take over the leadership of a lofty philosophical movement… “The Friends of Pure Reason”… But not at all! Nothing doing! For the first time in his life he’d really put his foot in it!… He’d loused himself up completely… The high fame of Auguste Comte was easily exported to the Antipodes, but couldn’t make it back! It stuck to the River Plate, indelible, undetachable. It refused to come home again. It was “for the Americans”, and there was nothing to be done about it, though for months and months he attempted the impossible… He tried everything he could think of, blackened whole columns of the Génitron, trying to give his “prayer” a winsome French flavour… he twisted it into a rebus, turned it inside out like a shirt, sprinkled it with flattery… he made it chauvinistic… Corneillian… violent and in the end contemptible… It didn’t do him a bit of good!

  Even the bust of Auguste Comte, which had long occupied a place of honour… the customers were sick of seeing it there to the left of the great Flammarion, it had to be removed. It was bad for business. The subscribers complained. They didn’t care for Auguste Comte. They liked Flammarion fine, Auguste Comte gave them the creeps. He loused up the shop window… That’s the way it was! It couldn’t be helped!

  On certain evenings much later when Courtial was down in the dumps, he said weird things…

  “Some day, Ferdinand, I’m going away… I’ll go to the devil… you’ll see!… I’ll go very far away… To the end of the world… All by myself… on my own!… You’ll see!…”

  And then he’d stay there in a dream… I didn’t like to interrupt him. He’d have those spells from time to time… It made me very curious…

  * * *

  Before des Pereires took me on, my uncle had done everything in his power to find me a job, he’d moved heaven and earth, stopped at nothing, he’d exhausted just about all his leads… Wherever he went he spoke of me in glowing colours… he got no results… He was certainly glad to put me up in his apartment on the Rue de la Convention, but after all he wasn’t rich… This couldn’t go on for ever! It wasn’t right for me to take advantage of him… Besides I was in the way… His pad wasn’t exactly spacious… I pretended to be asleep when he brought a girl home with him… on tiptoes… but just my being there must have cramped his style.

  For one thing he was extremely modest. You’d never have expected it, but about some things he was positively bashful… Even after he’d known Courtial for months, for instance, he wasn’t really at his ease with him. He sincerely admired him and didn’t dare to ask anything of him… He’d waited too long before telling him about me… though it was certainly on his mind… He felt responsible in a way… for my being left high and dry… without the slightest sign of a job…

  One day he finally screwed up his courage… As they were batting the breeze, he slipped in his little question… Wouldn’t he by some chance need a young secretary, just starting out in life, for his Bureau of Inventors or his aeronautics?… Uncle Édouard had no illusions about my aptitudes. He realized that I wasn’t very hot at the usual kind of job… he had a pretty keen eye… that my type and temperament required something out of the way, some kind of fly-by-night racket, something on the screwy side. With Courtial’s hare-brained schemes, his long-distance deals, I’d have a chance to make out… That was his idea.

  Courtial dyed his hair jet black and left his moustache and his goatee grey… His hair and his whiskers bristled like a cat, and his bushy rebellious eyebrows were even more ferocious, they were distinctly diabolical, especially the one on the left. He had small restless eyes, his pupils were always darting about deep in their caverns and then suddenly stopping dead when he had a bright idea. Then he’d laugh out loud, his whole belly would shake, he’d slap his thighs hard and then suddenly subside as though transfixed by thought, lost in admiration of his idea…

  It was he, Courtial des Pereires, who had obtained the second driving licence for racing cars issued in France. Over the desk we had his diploma in a gold frame and his photograph as a young man at the wheel of a monster, with the date and the rubber stamps. The end had been tragic… He often told me about it:

  “I was lucky!” he admitted. “Take it from me. We were coming into B
ois-le-Duc… the carburation was perfect!… I didn’t even want to slow down… I catch sight of the schoolteacher… she had climbed up on the embankment… She motioned to me… She’d read all my books… She waved her parasol… I didn’t want to be rude… I throw on my brakes outside the school… In a minute I’m surrounded, fêted!… I take a drink… I wasn’t supposed to stop again before Chartres… another ten miles… The last control station… I invite the young lady to come along… ‘Climb in, mademoiselle,’ I say… ‘Climb in beside me! Come along!’ She was cute. She hesitated, she shilly-shallied, she coquetted some… I pressed her… So she sits down beside me and off we go… All day long, at every control station, especially all through Brittany, there’d been cider and more cider… My machine was really humming, running fine… I didn’t dare to make any more stops… But I needed to badly!… Finally I had to give in!… So I throw on the brakes… I stop the car, I stand up, I jump, I spot a bush… I leave the chick at the wheel! ‘Wait for me!’ I sing out. ‘I’ll be back in a second!…’ I’d hardly touched a finger to my fly when so help me I’m stunned! Lifted off my feet! Dashed through the air like a straw in a gale! Boom! Stupendous! A shattering explosion!… The trees, the bushes all around, ripped up, mowed down, blasted! The air’s aflame! I land at the bottom of a crater, almost unconscious… I feel myself!… I pull myself together!… I crawl to the road!… A total vacuum! The car?… Gone, my boy… A vacuum! No more car! Evaporated!… Demolished! Literally! The wheels, the chassis… oak!… Pitch pine! All ashes!… The whole frame… Oh well!… I drag myself around, I scramble from one heap of earth to the next! I dig! I rummage! A few fragments here and there! A few splinters… A little piece of fan, a belt buckle! One of the caps of the gas tank… A hairpin! That’s all!… A tooth that I’ve never been sure about!… The official investigation proved nothing!… Explained nothing!… What would you expect?… The causes of that terrible conflagration will remain for ever a mystery… Almost two weeks later in a pond, six hundred yards from the spot, they found… after a good deal of dredging… one of the young lady’s feet, half-devoured by the rats.